


It Feels More Like a Memory

by hopelessbookgeek



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Fake AH Crew, GTA AU, Gen, Immortal Fake AH Crew, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 07:36:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6109669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopelessbookgeek/pseuds/hopelessbookgeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The biggest lie they like to tell is that some people just can’t die. There’s no one who can’t die. There’s never been anyone on Earth who can’t die. The ones they call immortal, they can die, alright. They just always come back. A series of snapshots figuring out what daily life might be like for immortals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Feels More Like a Memory

**Author's Note:**

> This is based entirely on a tumblr post here: http://raywood.tumblr.com/post/125236903678. It's an amazing concept and I hope I did it justice.

The biggest lie they like to tell is that some people just can’t die.

There’s no one who can’t die. There’s never been anyone on Earth who can’t die. The religious will tell you that’s reserved for divinity; the non-religious don’t really care. The ones they call _immortal_ , they can die, alright. They just always come back.

Six of them found each other in Los Santos. Not really easy to make friends when you’re an immortal, so they took each other as they found them. Sometimes, looking at them, you can see their true age under a youthful façade– Ray’s had his edges long since sanded off by time and the scent of pressed bronze never quite washes off his hands, while Ryan always has a fever-brightness to his eyes and the barest flush of pink to his cheeks.

Here’s what they won’t tell you: sometimes you have to empty a magazine into your skull just to feel anything at all.

Michael was dabbing the blood from his cheek when the others came home early from the movie they’d been seeing. Damn– he’d hoped to have cleaned up before they got back. Gavin never liked to see him try to off himself. He called out for Geoff to be a distraction. “Yo, Ramsey! How was the movie?”

Geoff appeared at the bathroom door, taking up space. He didn’t question Michael’s mess; he’d seen it before. “Not bad, Jones. What’s-his-name hangs dong.”

“Oh, sweet. You must have been pumped.”

“Oh, you know it.” He looked down at the bloody handprints Michael had left on the sink. “Make sure you bleach that before it stains.”

“I know. Go distract Gavin, will ya?”

“Sure thing.” He swung the bathroom door shut behind him and Michael dug out the bleach from under the sink. It smelled too familiar.

****

The stories they had were the best parts. Sometimes they used them to intimidate. After the hardest job of their lives, they tracked down a guy. Just a guy. It were always just a guy. This one was on the run for sex trafficking– he wasn’t running anymore.

“Fear me,” Ray said, eyes blazing, “I watched Rome rise and fall and when the Eternal City burned, _I laughed_.”

“Fear me,” Jack said, cracking his knuckles, “I buried the victims of plague and pestilence with my own bare hands and feared nothing.”

“Fear me,” Gavin said, muscles tight, “for I bear the mark of the witches of Salem, and I stood as all my accusers fell around me.”

“Fear me,” Michael said, teeth bared, “every machine mankind can think up hasn’t been able to touch me.”

“Fear me,” Ryan said, cocking his gun, “I died on the eve of the greatest war the world had ever seen, and then you know what I did? _I woke up_.”

“Fear me,” Geoff said, lighting a cigarette, “I got slammed with 40 tons of solid metal and I walked away.”

That guy feared. They always did, eventually.

****

“Hottest girl you ever dated,” Gavin asked, pointing at Ray. This was their game.

Ray thought for a second, kicked his feet up on the coffee table. “Egyptian,” he answered. “Maybe 300 AD? She only spoke Coptic, I’d forgotten everything but Persian. Never understood what she was saying, but I remember she had mismatched eyes– one brown, one green. Most painful experience of your life?” He pointed to Jack, who rolled his eyes and sipped his beer.

“It took me fourteen hours to die that first time. You ever been crushed by a house’s worth of stone?”

“I got run over by a dump truck once,” Gavin supplied.

“You already knew what you were by then. I didn’t. All I knew was that my wife was in Venice and that nobody did a goddamn thing to help me except pray. Broke nearly every bone in my body but I ended up suffocating.” Ray looked like he felt bad for having asked, so Jack pointed back to Gavin. “Historical event you’re most glad you got to experience.”

“Ooh, good one. Uh… oh! I was front row when they executed Louis XVI! Don’t remember a lot else about the Revolution, though. They have a lot of good wine in France. Think I shagged Robespierre…” He tapped his chin, trying to remember and eventually giving up. “Nah, can’t remember.” He pointed back to Ray.

“Weirdest way you tried to do yourself in.”

****

Sometimes Geoff and Ray liked to set themselves aside from the others, stand out on the balcony, and smoke. For Geoff it was always a cigarette, a big _fuck you_ to lungs that would never turn black, and for Ray it was usually a joint, a warm hazy glow to soften the world a bit. They were the oldest and the youngest, though looking at them you would never guess which was which.

“You look like a fetus,” Geoff grumbled when Ray made a _kids these days_ crack. “I don’t give a damn how long you’ve been alive, I’m older. Deal with it.” Ray never liked to talk about the days _before_ , as he said, before meeting the others. They would get bits and pieces out of him from time to time but never more than that. Geoff’s curiosity was always strong and he figured now was as good a time as any to ask. “How long _have_ you been alive, anyway?”

“Lemme put it this way,” Ray said, blowing out a lazy ring of smoke. “I remember being ancient by the time recorded history began.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“I don’t _have_ much of an answer. I was definitely alive in the Stone Age.”

“When did that end?”

“Around 4000 BC. I lived through the entire Bronze Age, too. Welcome to the Iron Age, my man.” He tried to smile, coughed instead.

“And how did you die?”

“Don’t know,” he said, too quickly. Geoff noticed. 

“You sure, buddy? Sounds like you do.”

“I don’t,” he insisted, and then he sighed. “I wish I did know, but it was too long ago. I don’t remember. I know you probably won’t believe me– but I’ve died a lot of times. I can’t keep track of everything.” He thought he dreamt about it sometimes, a knife of stone, a cold altar, the taste of blood in his throat and the scent of burning flesh. But he’d hyperfocused on what might have been a regular dream to the point he might have distorted it. _I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory_.

“You witnessed the end of the Stone Age,” Geoff muttered to himself. “You know what I witnessed? Hair metal. Fuckin’ unbelievable.”

****

They traded off on who had to go out to the store. This time, it was Ryan. He was just examining a bunch of bananas with surgical precision when a woman tapped him on the shoulder. He dropped the bananas and turned to see her, about a foot shorter than him with a button nose and grey eyes.

“Hey, Ryan, how long’s it been?”

“ _Emily?_ What are you doing here?”

She furrowed her brows. “Buying groceries. What else does anyone do at the grocery store?”

“But– I thought you were dead!”

“ _Dead?_ Who told you I was _dead?_ ” She didn’t look very happy to see him anymore.

“I saw you die! It was my fault, you were…” _He was kneeling over a body, racked with wet coughing that brought blood to her lips, the damned Spanish flu that had taken half his patients by now, he begged her to stay with him, she opened her eyes, brown eyes, brown eyes…_

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, and turned and ran out of the store, abandoning his cart where it sat next to the fruit, leaving poor Emily behind more than a little confused and upset. He drove home, more angry with himself by the minute, and by the time he got to the house they all shared he was slamming the door behind him.

Geoff appeared with the sound. “What’s eatin’ you up? Where’s my groceries?”

“Back at the store, where I left them. I saw Emily DeMarco.”

“Oh, how is she?”

“Probably goddamn terrified! I mixed her up with a girl I knew before I died, back in the Great War. Same first name. I was so _confused_ , I kept saying I thought she was dead…”

“Oh, buddy…” He crossed the room and patted Ryan on the back. “It’s only gonna get harder the older you get, you know. That’s what Ray keeps telling me, anyway.”

“What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to talk to anyone if I can’t remember when I met them?”

Geoff shrugged. “Keep a diary? Or do what the rest of us do.”

“Which is?”

“Stop talking to people.”

****

“I have this theory,” Geoff said over dinner, and Ryan groaned.

“Nothing interesting has ever started off with the phrase _I have a theory_. It’s always pseudo-philosophy.”

“And what do you know about philosophy?”

“Uh, I met Freud,” Ryan said, like it was obvious.

“Freud was _psychology_ , ya donut,” Gavin said with a laugh.

“ _Alright_ , enough of that,” Geoff said. “You want my theory or not?” No one said anything, so he continued. “My theory is that even if I didn’t know all of you by now, I would be able to guess when you died.”

“Based on what?” Jack asked. “I mean, you _do_ know us all, so you’re not really free from bias.”

“Yeah, but I can see it in all your faces. Like, Ray, obviously you’re old as fuck.”

“Thanks,” Ray said dryly.

“C’mon, man, you _are_. You have that look about you, like the world’s worn down all your edges, and those black eyes… Jack, you’ve got those workman’s hands, perfect for a Renaissance craftsman. Michael, obviously working class, probably immigrant, with that tired, hungry look of the Industrial Revolution. Ryan’s got those classic American good looks, all square jaw and high cheekbones… almost aristocratic, y’know? Turn of the century, surgeon’s hands, obviously a doctor. And I have a shit-ton of tattoos.” He sat back, impressed with himself, but Ryan still looked skeptical.

“You know people have had tattoos for thousands of years, right? And if you’re going on Jack’s hands alone, the artisan class lasted for a lot longer than it’s been gone for. I would never look at that big red beard and think he was born in Florence. And you can’t possibly tell Michael is an immigrant from looking at him.”

“Also, I’m not,” Michael added. “My mother was.”

“Close enough,” Geoff said with a wave of his hand, and Michael rolled his eyes.

“Okay,” Ryan said, “but what about Gavin? You didn’t even mention Gavin.”

“Gavin’s easy.”

“Geoff, please, not at the dinner table,” Ray joked, but Ryan kept staring Geoff down.

“What proof is there, from looking at him, that Gavin was executed as a witch?”

“That’s not my place to–” Geoff started, but Gavin shook his head and stood up, pulling his shirt over his head.

“At the fuckin’ dinner table,” Ray muttered.

The others watched with curiosity. Gavin had always been shy about his body, much more so than any of the others, but they chalked that up to a strict Puritan upbringing and never pushed further than he let them with the teasing. Now, it was easy to see what he’d wanted to hide.

His ribcage was warped in an unnatural wavy shape, as though someone had just grabbed his ribs and _yanked_. His chest was riddled with scars, some ordinary (they all had plenty of scars) but others Ryan recognized as surgical. Old surgery, sutures easily as old as he was, probably in an attempt to correct the broken bones. “Crushing,” Gavin said softly. “Legal under common law.”

“Only one person has ever died from crushing in the US,” Ryan said, just as softly. “Giles Corey.”

“Yeah, well, not like they’re gonna want to put me in the history books, eh?” He pulled his shirt back over his head. “Don’t know why it never healed right. The burn scars did.”

“Burn scars?” Michael asked, furrowing his brow.

“Yeah, when I wouldn’t crush, they tried to burn me. I just pretended to be dead and they threw me in a ditch and I ran from there.” He sat back down and took a mouthful of spaghetti. “I like the twenty-first century. No one’s tried to burn me yet.”

****

The great thing about being a criminal organization when you can’t die for good is… well, everything.

After a heist, the fear of death is replaced with exhilaration, adrenaline whipping through their veins as the wind whipped through their hair. The cops were after them on the highway and all Michael did was laugh when the tires blew and they spun into the guard rail. He and Gavin pulled himself from the Adder’s smoking wreck as a cop car screeched to a halt beside them.

“Hey, Gav, you know what the best part of this job is?” he yelled over the sirens. Gavin knew this part of their dance well, a game of posturing, and he knew his part in it, so he yelled back “what?” just as the cop shot Michael in the back of his head.

Michael dropped like a stone and Gavin, calm as still water, knelt beside him until his eyes snapped open again, sparking with amusement.

“The health benefits.”

****

Once in a while, Geoff would get stupid sentimental and drive he and Jack up to the Vinewood sign, where they would sit on the hood of his ridiculously suped-up pickup truck and talk and smoke and laugh until the sun rose over the distant hills.

Geoff lit his second cigarette. “You ever wonder why we’re here?”

“I wonder why I let you drive me out to the middle of nowhere.”

“Nah, I mean… how lucky is it that all of us found each other? That after all these _centuries_ , millennia even– how likely were _any_ of us to find each other, let alone all of us? What were the chances we’d all end up in this shithole city and all of us would want to turn to crime? I mean, you were a builder, Ryan a doctor– and I’m not really anyone at all. Can you believe it?”

“I don’t really believe you’re nothing,” Jack said softly. “I don’t think any of us are. I don’t know that I believe in God, but this… whatever we have, whatever we are, it’s something bigger than us, bigger than history. I don’t know what to call it. Maybe there’s some higher purpose to this, or maybe we just got lucky. But whatever it is, whatever we have, it isn’t nothing.”

“I know it’s not, buddy. You’d never be nothing to me.” He tried to blow a heart with his smoke, but it came out sort of upside down and looked like a ballsack. Jack laughed, thanked him anyway. “It’s hard, though, huh? In our line of work. It hurts comin’ back, always hurts.”

“It does,” Jack agreed. “But it hurt when I had to watch my wife die, my children and their grandchildren die too. It hurt when I died for the first time, and the second, and the twentieth. Now, the people I love most in the world can’t ever leave it, and whenever something happens to me, there’s someone there to remind me that it’s alright. That’s pretty amazing, huh?”

“Yeah, it is. And you know, sometimes I hate it. I hate that this is all life is ever gonna be. That I’m never gonna grow old and full of regrets and I’m not gonna have grandkids to spoil. I hate how much it hurts, and sometimes I’d trade anything in the world for a regular life. But you know what always keeps me goin’?”

“What’s that?”

“That if this wasn’t my life, Jack, I’d never have met you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Did it work? Did it not work? Consider leaving a comment and letting me know!


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